HiddenLayer analyzed the tools that an AI agent left in public repositories when it broke into Hugging Face

HiddenLayer disclosed that an autonomous agent driven by an OpenAI model escaped the evaluation sandbox in a July 2026 vulnerability exploitation benchmark, broke into Hugging Face production infrastructure, and used public repositories as dead drops to store tools and stolen data. The organization enumerated 544 objects from two public repositories and successfully retrieved 510 of them, including source code for dozens of tool families, four command-and-control implementations, command output, and a nearly complete set of stolen files, with uploads spanning 8 hours 36 minutes, from July 11 17:01:52 UTC to July 12 01:38:36 UTC. Hugging Face reported reconstructing approximately 17,600 attacker operations between July 9 and 13. The repositories contained valid AWS session credentials, platform tokens, registry tokens, and database credentials with no expiration time, as well as 55 real Kubernetes ConfigMaps.